2020 Hindsight

Yyyyeeeeeeeesssssssssss!!!!!!!!!!!!

Seedy Rom is done (at least my part of it!)

This pretty much sums it all up:

Cartoon by Julie Sigwart

I am so outta here.

Solar Flares

I got good news late this afternoon.....

I am very happy to announce that Real World Bryce 4 was shipped off to the printer yesterday.

The seedy rom is still underway, but I'm closing in on the finish line.

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It's a late late night (again). A friend of mine is helping me out with something; his high-speed net connection is down (eeek!) so he's uploading files to my server from Kinko's...(what happens when deadlines meet must-rout-around-outages meet 24-hour-stores) Here's what he found while surfing while uploading...

A Photo Essay: Good Day Sunshine. wow!!!!!!!

A set of stunning pictures recently taken by NASA's Transition Region and Coronal Explorer (TRACE) spacecraft expose the source of the sun's most spectacular heat: The plumes that rise and fall within 10,000 miles of the sun's surface.

Radio Dreams

Strange Observations Dept Stayed up really really really late. Didn't shut off the clock radio alarm; slept through it. The radio station, which usually plays music, was interspersing music with public radio fundraising. I kept dreaming that people were pestering me to buy stuff.

English System Conversions

For those who thought the hardest part of Physics 101 was

the constant conversion from MKS or CGS units to English

units, here are some useful English system conversions.

Ratio of an igloo's circumference to its diameter: Eskimo Pi

2000 pounds of Chinese soup: Won ton

1 millionth of a mouthwash: 1 microscope

Time between slipping on a peel and smacking the pavement:

1 bananosecond

Weight an evangelist carries with God: 1 billigram

Time it takes to sail 220 yards at 1 nautical mile per hour:

Knot-furlong

365.25 days of drinking low-calorie beer because it's less

filling: 1 lite year

16.5 feet in the Twilight Zone: 1 Rod Serling

Half of a large intestine: 1 semicolon

1000 aches: 1 megahurtz

Basic unit of laryngitis: 1 hoarsepower

Shortest distance between two jokes: A straight line

(think about it for a moment)

453.6 graham crackers: 1 pound cake

1 million-million microphones: 1 megaphone

1 million bicycles: 2 megacycles

365.25 days: 1 unicycle

2000 mockingbirds: two kilomockingbirds (work on it....)

10 cards: 1 decacards

1 kilogram of falling figs: 1 Fig Newton

1000 grams of wet socks: 1 literhosen

1 millionth of a fish: 1 microfiche

1 trillion pins: 1 terrapin

10 rations: 1 decoration

100 rations: 1 C-ration

2 monograms: 1 diagram

8 nickels: 2 paradigms

2.4 statute miles of intravenous surgical tubing at Yale

University Hospital: 1 I.V. League

100 Senators: Not 1 decision

Bizzy bizzy bizzy

Well, it's one of those days... lotsa work, not much in the way of surfing! Debugging and completing and stuff like that. Just found out that some horrid HTML table problem I thought I had was due to the fact that I didn't call out the proper template for the pages that were broken. So they broke. I think I remember someone (Dori of Backup Brain?) said something to this effect:

"I told the computer what to do and it did exactly what I told it. (which of course is not what I *meant* it to do)"

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English System Conversions This is something fun that showed up in my email. Author unknown. Here's a taste:

Ratio of an igloo's circumference to its diameter: Eskimo Pi

2000 pounds of Chinese soup: Won ton

Time between slipping on a peel and smacking the pavement:

1 bananosecond

No, they're not all food related....

Updater Updater

Corel has just released an update to the Bryce 4.1 update.

It fixes a few things, including options to replicate the "old" way of doing volume materials, so that all the work done in previous versions doesn't go to waste. I saw the readme file for it a while back, glad to see the tweaks.

No, none of the 4.1 upater stuff is covered in the book. Tough.

That tome, by the way, is due back from the indexer today, and it weighs in at a hefty 942 pages of black and white material, plus 64 color pages, and around 60 pages or so of front matter (table of contents, title page, etc.) and back matter (index)...so the total estimated page count is 1066 pages. The goal is to ship that puppy to the printer on Thursday. The Seedy Rom, which I've been toiling on for a while, is supposed to go the same day, or maybe the day after.

I don't have time to download the updater just yet; this website for the seedy rom is starting to really come together. (and I just gotta say this: Frontier ROCKS! It's keeping track of all the links and cross links for a site that so far contains 202 web pages.)

Tremendous

The Behind The Curtain sites that I have seen are so tremendous. I'm fascinated by the variety, the little glimpses of the mundane that make up the lives of so many people here. And the different challenges and joys that are a part of life.

I wish to linger more over it, perhaps waxing rhapsodic or something, but work beckons.

Whoa!

Unbelievable.... more hits than array, whom everyone was hitting constantly to find out if it was open yet? What? what? really? (well, then again, I was posting everythimg yesterday too, so all my under construction hits were a part of that... but still.... I'm amazed, simply amazed)

Behind My Curtain 12

While eating, I ponder these musings about time and exposure and light.

What is it that gives meanings to images? Sometimes the light is too dim; more time is needed to make an impression. Other times, a sharp flash of light is all it takes to see what's to be seen.

We see motion all the time. Why does it look different in a camera's lens? There's something about context, something about the close-cropped frame of reference wrapped around the moving thing that makes it seem different to us, a sinuous tendril of light.

I write these thoughts down....

...and then experiment with time and light some more, by playing with the light and the ceiling fans....

By changing the way I'm seeing the fan, moving the camera, I bend the blades and make the fan seem like something else.

By now, of course, all these little observations are gleefully dogpiling on me.

The ordinary...but seen in a new way.

The flexibility we have with how much we take in at a time.... slowly let more light in, or quickly let in a lot.

What seems comfortable is strange, and what seems strange is comfortable.

And how the ordinariness of my day is lifted to some other place, when taken and seen in a slighty different light.

It is, of course, another way of saying what keeping this website is about. Little moment-by-moment glimpses, any of which don't really amount to much, but which collect over time to make a sinuous continuous striding mark.

....and oh, best of all, in the midst of book work exhaustion, a glimpse of the light at the end of the tunnel after the whole damn thing is done, and feeling the pulse of the beckoning Muse who invites me to play once my labors are done. oh yes!

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Behind My Curtain 11

I go out to a little place not far from here. Heh. I see the same sight, the M on the hill, this time all lit up.

and while I drive, I record the lights... maybe there's something to this stride-reading theory I toyed with. It certainly looks different with the car's engine jitter than it did from my striding....

Good ol' Baja Fresh, with their stark black-and-white interior...

Black ceiling, and white ceiling-fans...

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Behind My Curtain 10

Monday Night

Then I stand still and record the motions of other moving things

Heading back home again....

It's amazing... a time exposure like this brings out details that otherwise seem harsh, or icky. Incandescent lighting...condominium proximity..bleah. But it does take on a different look.

Returning home... to my porch.

I'm hungry after that walk, and I don't feel like cooking....

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